It's Poverty, Stupid!

Why U.S. reading scores just aren't going up...

No Child Left Behind, Reading First, Race to the Top—what these federal programs have in common is that they represent literally billions of hours of teacher and student time and billions of dollars spent over the past 12-15 years, trying to improve reading achievement in the U.S. public schools. Yet we have very little to show for all this effort and all this money.

This graph shows U.S. reading scores from 2003-2015 on the two most respected achievement tests in education: the NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) and the PISA (Program for International Student Assessment).

Source: Nancy F. Knapp

Looking at six year intervals, it's pretty clear that not much has changed. The blue and red lines, representing fourth- and eighth-graders' reading scores on the NAEP, do show some very slight progress, less than two percent overall, while the twelfth-graders NAEP reading scores (green) and the reading scores on the PISA, which tests 15-year-olds who are mainly in tenth grade (purple), have remained essentially flat.

Why can't we make any progress? While many might (and did) argue that some of the reading reforms of the past 12 years, and much of the money spent on them, were too one-sided, ignoring or even discouraging some of the strategies we know to be most effective for reading development, there is another major factor holding us back: in 2015, more than one in five U.S. children were living in poverty, and poverty adversely affects reading development in multiple and complex ways.

Direct effects

At its most basic, poverty can be defined as a lack of necessary material resources, which can directly affect poor children's overall development and, specifically, their development in reading. For example, children in poverty are likely to have fewer books and less access to the Internet, and we know that availability of reading materials in the home is directly connected to reading development. Poor children also tend to own fewer toys and have fewer experiences with novel or stimulating environments, all of which can adversely impact their oral language and general knowledge, which in turn will hinder their reading development.

But most children in poverty face more fundamental problems than simple lack of books and experiences. Children in poverty frequently experience food-insecurity, and in this country, many also go without basic health and dental care, putting them at serious risk for both current illness and longer-term health issues. Poor health, painful teeth, and lack of nutritious food impact children's physical and cognitive development, and they also make it harder to learn to read.

Family-mediated effects

Poverty also affects children indirectly, through its adverse effects on their families. Families that cannot afford even inadequate housing move frequently and may suffer periods of homelessness, causing some poor children to routinely change schools two or three times within a single year. Working adults in poor families are more likely to hold low-wage, service jobs, with no benefits, no paid sick or family leave, and unpredictable hours, which means that routine health or dental care is often out of reach, quality child care is rarely available and difficult to arrange and pay for, and one car break-down, late bus, or sick child can cause tardiness or absence for both children and working parents.

According to medical researchers Wadsworth & Rienks (2012), living in that kind of stress results in "constant wear and tear on the body, dysregulating and damaging the body's stress response system, and reducing cognitive and psychological resources for battling adversity and stress" (p. 1). Such stress, along with unhealthy housing conditions, can lead to chronic health problems like asthma, which is 66 percent more common in children living below the poverty level. Higher levels of stress can also impact family relationships. Hart and Risley's classic 1995 study found that parents living in poverty even communicated with their children more negatively, averaging “five affirmatives [to] 11 prohibitions per hour” (p. 117).

Poverty also seems to be specifically related to the amount and types of reading done in families. In part due to lack of time and resources, parents in high-poverty homes are less likely to model literate behaviors like reading for pleasure, and also less likely to read aloud to their young children, who thus miss a vital foundation for school learning.

Community-mediated effects

Rather than helping to make up for the disadvantages they face, the characteristics of the communities in which many poor children live are more likely to pose additional barriers. Neighborhoods in which poor families are increasingly concentrated in this country have higher than average rates of violent and property crime as well as more open enticements to harmful behaviors such as drug or alcohol use. Because poor people have less political influence, such neighborhoods also often lack adequate civic services, from police and fire protection to trash collection. They are more likely to experience dangerous levels of traffic, outdoor air and water pollution from nearby industry and agriculture, and indoor pollution from mold, insects, and lead paint. Again, these factors all negatively impact children's emotional, physical, and cognitive health, and thus their ability to learn to read.

Susan Neuman and her colleagues at New York University have found that poorer neighborhoods also have significantly fewer reading-related resources of all kinds, from bookstores and public libraries to the very signs in the stores, and of course, the deep disparities between schools in poor and well-off neighborhoods are well-known and long-standing.

Societally-mediated effects

Interwoven and often causal in all the above-discussed issues is the way our country continues to treat people in poverty, including children. New voter-identification laws, recent restriction of advance voting and voting hours, and inadequate polling places in poor neighborhoods combine to discourage poor people from using their votes to improve their lot. The increasing influence on our political process of massive political spending also works to silence their voices. The zoning of dangerous traffic and polluting industries into poor neighborhoods, unequal school funding, deliberate concentration of poverty housing coupled with restrictive housing codes in more affluent neighborhoods, lax enforcement of housing codes and unconcern for civic services in poor neighborhoods are all common because most people in poverty lack the political power to effectively oppose them. At the same time, families in poverty are often blamed for not surmounting these societally-erected barriers, while teachers and schools lower their expectations for poor children because their parents are perceived as "not caring."

What are we trying to say here?

It is far from our intention here to imply that the problems are so large and complex that there is “nothing we can do” to help children from low-income homes learn to read, and read well. Rather, we hope that calling attention to the complex and multi-layered nature of poverty’s effects on reading development may encourage teachers and schools to look for specific ways to mitigate some of these barriers and, most of all, convince educational policy makers at all levels to look beyond carrot-and-stick efforts to raise test scores, and begin to address the real issues these children face as they try to master the reading skills which are so essential in today's world.

First, your definition of "poverty" is too general. Almost no child has the ability to provide for necessities for himself. Do you mean a child's parents lack the ability to provide the necessities of life for him? What is "necessary?" What about a TV or a cellphone? What if a child's parents have the ability to provide for him, but choose not to, is that poverty? What should we be doing about it that we are not doing now? What about government dependents? What about cultural values? Implicit in your article is that shooting down voter ID is somehow an answer to poor reading outcomes. That is patently ridiculous. First of all, everyone who gets any government benefits at all, or who works, has ID. They are not skipping the ballot box for that reason. Second, they will vote themselves more handouts, which will not filter to the benefit of their children, whom they are not taking adequate care of now. That is nothing but an incentive for people who are the most ill-equipped to actually raise children to just keep having more of them, with no thought whatsoever as to their raising. A child deserves a stable peaceful home with one or preferably two parents attentive to his needs in which he can grow and study. Unless and until we are willing to admit we made a huge mistake with the welfare state, we are going to have even more children coming up in chaotic, neglectful, and dangerous existences, dragging down the reading score averages even further, even with theunconscionable dumbing down that has gone on. We are not doing right by our children. Doing more of the same will not help them one jot.

Wow...a lot of blaming the victim here Ana. A hand-up is not the same as a hand-out. I would hope that most middle and upper socioeconomic groups would have more compassion toward the less fortunate. It's easy to blame others for their own plight when you are the one who has had all the advantages. When you live in poverty sometimes you cannot see beyond it. Hope you reconsider your viewpoint. Karma is a bitch. Namaste.

In the Tibetan Buddhist orphanages I know, all the kids can read fine and they all live in dormitories and all their stuff fits in one dresser so basically they are doing well academically despite living below the poverty level.

So the issue is more about what kind of poverty, what culture of poverty. Basically it is so much more than just about money.

Awesome!
A timely metanalysis of how the wealth/opportunity gap facilitates fundamental root causes that makes meaningful learning for the non-privileged, let alone lifelong wellness, effectively elusive.
Agency for learners without resources-in their families, their communities or their societies-effectively does not exist. They may find a way to swim against the current they are facing in the classroom and schools (and charter schools only further deteriorate public schools to the detriment of the poor while also undermining notions of community in larger society) but eventually they must struggle with the psychological toll that Adverse Childhood Experiences invariably levy.
Truly there are no choices for impoverished parents of school aged children when their regional socioeconomic fabrics have been torn to shreds by systemic inequality and iniquity, so what can happen but cycles of hopelessness and poverty?
There is no greater failure of societies than when they fail in ensuring their children's wellness: it is the definition of collective pathology when short term gain supplants our future hope, our children.

Thanks for bringing Charter Schools into the conversation I think they have been presented as the "solution" for educating children living in poverty, perpetuating the idea that, if we just had the right kind of schooling, poverty wouldn't negatively impact children's learning--and every bit of experience and research we have over decades refutes that assumption. To be clear: Yes, there are a lot of things schools and teaches can do to help children in poverty learn better and more easily, and they should do them, and keep looking for more! But No, schools and teachers alone cannot, for the majority of students in poverty, remove all the barriers or make up for all the disadvantages they experience--that is something our society as a whole desperately needs to address.

What about the root causes of poverty. About who is creating the money, the interest, the debts. About the private and public sector. About politics..... and so on. All is said and written. But for a more fair, healthy, sustainable, democratic, transparant and so on society, we, citizens, have to DIYT. Do It Yourself Together. So, it's the citizens co-responsability to go for fair & healthy money, fair & healthy trade, and so on. Think global, act local. By connecting, cooperating, cocreating.... it can. And me? yeah, i'm working on it through local democracy on real issues by competent people. So, without the disfunctioning political parties incl. disfunctional people. It can be done. Not, of its own, of course. You have to work on it, it's everybody's responsability. Smart strategies can help, while operating in the public field. In a real democratic way = personal politics.